Jean Francois Millet eBook

A picture like this teaches us that there are other
ways of giving a figure beauty than by making the
face pretty. Just as Millet’s Shepherdess
differs altogether from the little Bopeep of the nursery
tale, so this peasant girl is not at all like the pretty
milkmaids who carry milking-stools and shining pails
through the pages of the picture books. Millet
had no patience with such pictures. Pretty girls
were not fit for hard work, he said, and he always
wanted to have the people he painted look as if they
belonged to their station. Fitness was in his
mind one of the chief elements of beauty.

So he shows us in this Milkmaid a young woman framed
in the massive proportions of an Amazon, and eminently
fitted for her lot in life. Her chief beauty
lies in the expression of her splendidly developed
figure. Her choicest gifts are the health and
virtue which most abound in the free life of God’s
country.

“God made the country, and man made
the town.
What wonder, then, that health and virtue,
gifts
That can alone make sweet the bitter draught
That life holds out to all, should most
abound
And least be threatened in the fields
and groves."[2]

A study of the lines of the picture will show the
artistic beauty of the composition. You may trace
a long beautiful curve beginning at the girl’s
finger tip and extending along the cord across the
top of the milk jar. Starting from the same point
another good line follows the arm and shoulder across
the face and along the edge of the jar. At the
base of the composition we find corresponding lines
which may be drawn from the toe of the right foot.
One follows the diagonal of the path and the other
runs along the edge of the lifted skirt.

There are other fine lines in the drawing of the bodice
and the folds of the skirt. Altogether they are
as few in number and as strongly emphasized, though
not so grand, as those of the Sower.

[Footnote 1: The title of Water-Carrier has been
incorrectly attached to this picture, though the sketch
on which it is based is properly known as the Milkmaid.]

[Footnote 2: From Cowper’s Task.]

XIV

THE WOMAN CHURNING

Again we are in the picturesque province of Normandy,
and are shown the interior of a dairy where a woman
is busy churning. It is a quaint place, with
raftered ceiling and stone-paved floor, and the furnishings
are only such as are required by the work in hand.
On some wooden shelves against the farther wall are
vessels of earthenware and metal, to hold cream, cheese,
butter, and the like. The churn is one of the
old-fashioned upright sort, not unlike those used in
early New England households, and large enough to
contain a good many quarts of cream. The woman
stands beside it, grasping with both hands the handle
of the dasher, or plunger, which is worked up and down
to keep the cream in motion and so change it into
butter.